Hitler
Page 107
The historical causes of the Holocaust are varied and cannot be reduced to the figure of Hitler. Anti-Semitism and racism were widespread in Germany and Europe; they had been firmly institutionalized within the administrative apparatus of the Nazi regime. Interest in a radical ‘solution to the Jewish question’ existed within the regime in different forms and with a variety of motivations – ideological, political, economic; and, for a number of reasons, the war encouraged the radicalization of Jewish persecution. However, the Holocaust cannot be explained solely by the coming together of these various factors, by structures and functions, however important these may be.
For a systematic anti-Semitic policy to emerge out of the widespread hostility to the Jews and for this policy to be geared to the most radical possible solution required the engagement, the coordination, the driving force of the authoritative man at the top of the regime, and in a particular historical situation, as he perceived it.
During the middle of March, Globocnik began supervising deportations of the Jews in the districts of Lublin and Galicia to the Belzec death camp, which had been under construction since autumn 1941 and was now ready. By the middle of April, around 60,000 people had been murdered there, the majority of whom had been designated as ‘incapable of work’.45 Thousands of people had also been killed during the course of the bloody clearance of the ghettos. The mass murder in these two districts represented the first step in the ‘Final Solution’ in the General Government, as envisaged in the Wannsee Conference.
The deportation of the Jews from Reich territory, which had been interrupted during the winter, was also resumed in March. By mid-June, around 55,000 people had been deported to the General Government in a ‘third deportation wave’. In general, the trains from the Reich were halted in Lublin, where men who were considered ‘capable of work’ were sorted out and assigned to the camp at Majdanek.46 The other deportees were placed in Polish ghettos (above all, Izbica, Piaski, Zamos´c´),47 whose inhabitants had been murdered shortly beforehand in Belzec.48 The majority of the Jews deported from the Reich succumbed to the miserable conditions in the ghettos during the following months; most of the survivors were deported to death camps. This pattern of systematic murder was a repetition of what had already happened in Łódz´ , Riga, and Minsk: the indigenous Jews were murdered and the Jews from the Reich then provisionally accommodated in the ‘freed-up’ ghettos.
By now, deportations were occurring in other countries. On the basis of an agreement that Himmler had made with Slovakia in autumn 1941,49 between March and June 1942 Slovakian Jews were deported for forced labour in the district of Lublin and in Auschwitz in Upper Silesia.50 At the end of March, following a decision by the military administration already made in December 1941, an initial train with a thousand Jewish men from France also went to Auschwitz. This was termed a ‘hostage transport’ and regarded as a reprisal for the actions of the French resistance. However, in March, the RSHA envisaged deporting a further 5,000 Jews from France to Auschwitz.51 And, at the beginning of April, preparations were made for the deportation of a further half a million Jews from the Reich, Slovakia, the Protectorate, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.52
Hitler’s comments on the ‘Jewish question’, which Goebbels noted in March and April, can be read as a kind of commentary on these events: ‘The Jews must be got out of Europe, if necessary by using the most brutal means.’53 When, at the end of March, Goebbels learnt of the existence of the Belzec death camp, he had no doubt that Hitler was responsible for the murders being carried out there, since the ‘Führer is the protagonist and advocate of a radical solution, which, in view of the situation, is necessary and therefore appears unavoidable’.54 And in April, after a further meeting with Hitler, he noted: ‘He wants to drive the Jews out of Europe completely. That is absolutely right. The Jews have caused so much misery in our part of the world that the toughest punishment that one can possibly inflict on them is still too mild.’55
However, the people whom the RSHA were deporting from central Europe to Poland were not yet being killed in the death camps that already existed. At this point, it was Polish Jews, designated as ‘incapable of work’, who were being murdered in the gas chambers of Belzec and the gas vans of Chelmno. In Auschwitz, where the first gassings took place in Crematorium I from September 1941 onwards, the main victims were sick prisoners, Soviet POWs, as well as sick and exhausted Jewish prisoners from forced labour camps in annexed Upper Silesia.56
Evidently, the RSHA was still sticking to the plan, outlined by Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference, of deporting the majority of Jews from western and central Europe to the occupied Soviet territories after the final military victory in the East. However, during the following months, on the basis of their initial experience with the gassings in Poland, this old plan was finally abandoned.
Crisis in the judiciary
It was not pure chance that, between spring and late summer 1942, Hitler engaged in a power struggle with the hated state bureaucracy over domestic affairs. For this was precisely the phase when, on the basis of renewed victories, he became increasingly convinced that he was about to achieve his dream of an empire providing Germany with living space. Hitler had not held any cabinet meetings since 1937, with the result that the government no longer existed as a collective body; the individual ministries went their own way. Hitler ruled with the aid of his chancelleries, above all with the support of the indispensable Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, who communicated Hitler’s wishes not only to the Party agencies but also to the ministries and to the special commissioners appointed by Hitler.
In spring 1942, Hitler decided to deal a further blow to the state administration, which was already in the process of disintegration. In a system governed by the absolute authority of the Führer’s will it was burdensome to continue to operate within legal rules and bureaucratic procedures. Instead, the principle of the arbitrary, politically-determined ‘measure’ was finally to triumph over the ‘state governed by norms’. Hitler chose the judiciary as the target for the further emasculation of the state bureaucracy. He now homed in on it, to begin with in comments to his entourage.57
Hitler’s attacks began in February and March 1942. On 8 February 1942, for example, he declared: ‘Our judiciary is still too inflexible!’. The judiciary failed to understand that, during wartime, crimes that were committed in the blackout represented a particular threat to public security and, therefore, should be given exemplary punishment. It was also completely pointless sentencing soldiers to years of imprisonment if this meant that they avoided service at the front. ‘In any case, after ten years of penal servitude a person is of no further use to the national community. Who’s going to give him work? Someone like that should either be given a life sentence in a concentration camp or be killed.’ The judiciary, on the other hand, spent its time poking around ‘in their law books to come up with a sentence that fits in with their way of doing things in peacetime. It’s vital that such sentences are suspended!’58
On 19 March, Hitler told Goebbels that he was determined to ‘get the Reichstag once again to provide him with special powers for a thorough overhaul of the conduct of political and military affairs’. It is clear from Goebbels’s report that Hitler did not simply want to attack the alleged abuses, thereby undermining the existing judicial system, but aimed to use his ‘criticism of the judicial system’ as a platform for securing a symbolic enhancement of his position as Führer vis-à-vis the state bureaucracy as a whole. These ‘special powers’ were specifically intended to give him the authority to intervene arbitrarily throughout the military and civilian sectors, and to make an example of officers or civil servants irrespective of their legal rights, dismissing or punishing them. Hitler referred in this context to the ‘Hoepner case’, that of the general he had dismissed from the Wehrmacht in January without regard to Hoepner’s legal rights as an officer, making it clear which way the wind was blowing. Two days after this conversation, Hitler s
igned an edict concerning the simplification of the administration of justice, intended to speed up the processing of cases as much as possible.59
All that was now required was a pretext to launch the attack on the judiciary and the civil service. An article in the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe of 21 March alerted Hitler to the Schlitt case. A week earlier, the 29-year-old Ewald Schlitt had been sentenced by the district court in Oldenburg to five years’ penal servitude after his wife had died in an asylum. Schlitt had been abusing his wife for a long time, and, three months before, had subjected her to a brutal attack. The court considered this incident responsible for the woman’s physical decline and eventual death, sentencing Schlitt to five years’ penal servitude for manslaughter.60 However, in Hitler’s view the only appropriate punishment was the death penalty. Up until now, Hitler had not in fact had a legal basis for peremptorily dismissing judges with whose sentencing policy he disagreed.61 Now, that night, he telephoned state secretary Franz Schlegelberger, since Gürtner’s death in January 1941 the acting Minister of Justice, demanding that the sentence be revised. Moreover, he threatened to take the ‘toughest measures’ if the judiciary did not mend its ways.62 The head of the Justice Ministry responded to Hitler’s criticism by referring the Schlitt case to the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig.63 On 31 March, Schlegelberger was able to inform Hitler that Schlitt had been condemned to death, and the sentence was carried out on 2 April.64
On 29 March, during dinner, Hitler sketched out his ideas as follows: ‘The whole of current jurisprudence [is] nothing but a systematic abdication of responsibility’. Thus, he would do everything he could to make ‘the study of the law, that is the study of that kind of legal thinking, appear as contemptible as possible’. Moreover, ‘apart from a select group of up to 10 per cent of judges, he would replace the whole of the judiciary’. The ‘totally bogus system of using lay judges’, which simply enabled judges to evade their responsibility, would be abolished.65 Four days later, Hitler issued an edict toughening the Wehrmacht’s sentencing policy: ‘Dubious elements must be prevented from using the opportunity of avoiding front line service by sitting out their sentence in prison.’ Instead, military units for prisoners had to be immediately created and ‘must where possible be deployed with the fighting troops to undertake the toughest duties under dangerous conditions’.66
Around a month later, on 26 April, Hitler outlined his criticisms of the judicial system in a speech to the Reichstag. He began by explaining how the winter crisis had been overcome, once again blaming the deterioration of the military situation on the ‘international world parasite’. He effectively confirmed the widespread rumours about the fate of the Jews by declaring that, during ‘recent years, one state after another’ in Europe had been compelled by ‘its instinct for self-preservation to introduce measures that were designed to provide permanent protection against this international poison’.67
As the climax of his speech, Hitler requested the Reichstag expressly to confirm that he possessed ‘the legal powers to oblige everybody to do their duty’ and ‘to subject to military degradation or dismiss from their office and position’ anyone who failed to perform their duty, irrespective of his ‘acquired rights’. As he had discussed with Goebbels at the end of March, Hitler assumed the right to dismiss officials regardless of their rights and privileges as civil servants, including their right to a pension.68 Hitler concluded his speech with sharp criticism of the judicial system and, without naming names, quoted in detail the sentence in the Schlitt case, which he ‘found incomprehensible’.
Hitler’s request was immediately accepted by the Reichstag. Its resolution, which repeated the main passage in Hitler’s speech, was given official status by being published in the official legal journal, the Reichsgesetzblatt.69 It stated that Hitler, without being bound by existing legal provisions, was ‘entitled at any time . . . if necessary, to dismiss from his office, his rank or his position any German, whether a simple soldier or an officer, a low- or a high-ranking official or judge, a senior or a junior Party functionary, a blue- or a white-collar worker, without the need to follow prescribed procedures’. Hitler possessed this right ‘as Führer of the nation, as the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, as head of government and possessor of supreme executive authority, as the supreme judge, and as leader of the Party’. The listing of all his official functions was designed to underline the fact that this empowerment of Hitler reflected his sovereign and autocratic position. The resolution was a demonstration of power targeted at the civil service, and designed to put it under psychological pressure and publicly humiliate it. However, it represented above all a symbolic degradation. For, in practice, Hitler’s special powers did not acquire any legal significance.70
Although the Security Service was expected to report positively on the reception of Führer propaganda, it could not disguise the confusion in the population’s response to Hitler’s speech of 26 April. After all, his assurance that they were well equipped for war during the coming winter implied that it was unlikely that the war would be over by the autumn. Moreover, many asked themselves why on earth a further extension of his powers was necessary when, in effect, he already possessed absolute authority. Thus his action was interpreted as a sign of weakness.71
This confusion was increased by the rarity of Hitler’s public appearances. The reason for this was not only his intensive preoccupation with military affairs, which absorbed most of his energy, but presumably also his awareness that he would damage his prestige as a charismatic leader and warlord if he kept banging on in public about the tough demands made by the war and the need to stand firm. Moreover, the winter of 1941/42 had taken its toll on his energies and resilience. He failed to attend the celebrations of his 53rd birthday on the evening before 20 April. Goebbels tried to gloss over the fact by drawing attention to the parallels between King Frederick the Great of Prussia and Hitler, which were stressed in the film Der grosse König [The Great King], premiered in March 1942. In his speech, which he had got Hitler to approve,72 Goebbels praised the king as someone who, ‘despite crushing blows that sometimes brought him to the brink of collapse, kept finding the strength to triumph over testing times and defeats, and to act as a shining example of steadfastness in adversity, to his people, to his soldiers, to sceptical generals, wavering ministers, conspiring relatives, and recalcitrant officials’. Like Frederick the Great, Hitler was engaged in a ‘titanic struggle’ for ‘the life of our people’.73 The film showed Frederick as prematurely aged by grief and the burdens of responsibility, a clear indication that Führer propaganda was undergoing a profound transformation.
The conduct of war in spring 1942
In his Directive No. 41 of 4 April 1942 Hitler had assigned the forces in the East the primary task in the southern sector of ‘securing a breakthrough into the Caucasus region’. In the course of this offensive the enemy was ‘to be destroyed in front of the Don’, and Hitler gave detailed instructions as to how the pincer movements were to be carried out, referring to Stalingrad as a goal of the operations. Afterwards, they were to conquer the oil region further east, considered by Hitler essential for the continuation of the war, and the Caucasus. However, the Kerch peninsula and Sebastopol were the initial targets and the Izyum region, where the Red Army had established a salient, also had to be cleared. Following the conclusion of operations in the south, his second major operation for the coming year was to be the capture of Leningrad.74
Thus, in effect the directive represented an admission that, following Germany’s failure to defeat the Red Army during the previous year, and its great difficulty in overcoming the winter crisis, the armies in the East were now only capable of mounting a limited offensive. Only one of the three army groups was going to carry out a wide-ranging offensive. Moreover, even if all its goals were achieved, while the Soviet Union would have been considerably weakened by the cutting off of its important sources of raw materials, it would still not have been completely defeated
. In other words, the war in the East would have to be continued during 1943, although Hitler hoped that he would be able to free up a considerable number of troops in order to provide a counterweight to America’s growing military potential. The military leadership supported the basic premise of the offensive, but was fully aware that, fundamentally, the resources were inadequate even for this advance in the south, on which every effort was now to be concentrated. In fact, the initial successes of the summer offensive were due primarily to the fact that the Soviet leadership had anticipated a resumption of the attack on Moscow, concentrating large forces in the central sector of the front. In short, the summer offensive was a final effort on the part of the already seriously weakened eastern armies, which were no longer capable of mounting another major campaign.75
Halder was obliged to report to Hitler that, as a result of the winter battles, there had been a ‘wastage’ of 900,000 men, of which it had been possible to replace only half. Of the total of 2,340 tanks lost during the winter only 80 per cent could be replaced.76 The army’s general staff estimated that only 5 per cent of divisions were capable of carrying out all tasks, 8 out of 162; in June 1941 it had been almost two thirds: 134 out of 209. The transport situation in the East was precarious; the shortage of fuel was undermining the army’s mobility.77